In nominating Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump selected a scion of the Republican legal establishment who has fought to complete a judicial counterrevolution that has eluded conservatives for decades.

Born in Washington, D.C., Judge Kavanaugh, 53 years old, has stayed close to his Beltway roots. With influential parents—his father headed a cosmetics trade association, his mother was a state judge in Maryland—Judge Kavanaugh spent most of his career in prominent political and legal roles that placed him at the conservative movement’s epicenter.

Fresh from his clerkship with Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1994, he joined Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which ultimately led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House before he was acquitted by the Senate.

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President Donald Trump is nominating Brett Kavanaugh to fill the newest vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing a conservative figure who, if confirmed, could push a divided court to the right. PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

After helping imperil one presidency, Judge Kavanaugh sought to safeguard another, working for candidate George W. Bush in the recount imbroglio following the November 2000 election and then spending six years in the White House as a lawyer and eventually staff secretary to the president.

Mr. Bush appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006—his third attempt, after Senate Democrats killed previous Kavanaugh nominations in 2003 and 2005.

Judge Kavanaugh long has been seen as a super-achiever of the right, not merely active in the Federalist Society network that fuels a pipeline of Republican judicial candidates, but possessed of the brains, work habits and personality that marked him for conservatives almost from the outset as a potential Supreme Court justice. In addition to his duties on the bench, he has maintained an active speaking schedule and regularly teaches at Harvard Law School.

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The nominee moved from Georgetown Prep, the all-boys Jesuit boarding school where he overlapped with future Justice Neil Gorsuch, to Yale’s college and law school. He held clerkships with Ronald Reagan-appointed judges, first Walter Stapleton of the Third Circuit in Philadelphia and then Alex Kozinski of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit.

After a year in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office, Judge Kavanaugh served as a law clerk for Justice Kennedy—whom he is slated to replace—during the 1993-94 term, where he worked alongside future Justice Gorsuch, a clerk to retired Justice Byron White on loan to the Kennedy chambers. Although Justice Kennedy sometimes selected law clerks with more centrist leanings, both Judge Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch impressed fellow clerks with their staunch conservatism.

Judge Kavanaugh then signed onto the Whitewater investigation into Mr. Clinton, eventually writing much of the Starr Report that prompted the president’s impeachment—not for the Arkansas real-estate deal that initially prompted the investigation, but for lying under oath when questioned about an affair with a White House intern. As a deputy to Mr. Starr, Judge Kavanaugh appeared before the Supreme Court in an effort to subpoena notes taken nine days before the suicide of Vincent Foster, a friend and deputy counsel to Mr. Clinton, by an attorney Mr. Foster consulted. The Supreme Court rejected the argument 6-3, holding that attorney-client privilege didn’t expire upon the client’s death.

After Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton, Judge Kavanaugh became a top deputy to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, helping select judicial nominees who had been carefully vetted for their commitment to the conservative legal agenda. When Judge Kavanaugh’s own name came forward for a judgeship, Democrats tried to dismiss him as an ideological warrior rather than impartial jurist.

“You could not think of another nomination, given Mr. Kavanaugh’s record, more designed to divide us,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), now the Senate minority leader, said at a 2004 hearing. “This nomination appears to be judicial payment for political services rendered.”

Three years of delay didn’t necessarily raise Judge Kavanaugh’s prospects. The Bush White House faced a series of scandals as its time wound down, and questions over Judge Kavanaugh’s role gave Democrats further ammunition and apparently contributed to an American Bar Association panel lowering his rating, to “qualified” from “well qualified.”

Republicans said Judge Kavanaugh himself had been the target of political vendetta. “I take exception with those who argue that this very bright, very honest, very fair, very hardworking lawyer is somehow not qualified to sit on the bench,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) said at one hearing.

Judge Kavanaugh, citing as role models the revered Justice Robert Jackson, as well as Justice Byron White, a John F. Kennedy appointee who dissented from Roe v. Wade, was confirmed in 2006 by a 57-36 vote.

During his 12-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Judge Kavanaugh has become an increasingly prominent conservative voice, especially as older conservative judges retired.

Based in the nation’s capital, the court has a heavy diet of cases on federal regulations and enforcement, and Judge Kavanaugh frequently has voiced concerns about government going too far. In a dissent last year, he said Obama-era net-neutrality rules, which required internet service providers to treat all the traffic on their networks equally, were an unlawful exercise of power by the Federal Communications Commission.

In 2016 he wrote an opinion that found the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional, saying the agency’s director had too much authority to regulate the U.S. economy without being accountable to the president. The D.C. Circuit later reconsidered the case with more judges participating and voided Judge Kavanaugh’s ruling.

And on several occasions he has faulted the Environmental Protection Agency in opinions that drew sharp criticism from environmentalists.

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In a recent address to CUA Law School graduates, Judge Brett Kavanaugh paid tribute to Thurgood Marshall and Antonin Scalia, who fought for “ideas that were not in fashion.”

Judge Kavanaugh wrote a 2012 ruling that struck down an EPA regulation that placed limits on power-plant pollution that blows across state lines. The Supreme Court reversed that decision in 2014 on a 6-2 vote, with Justice Kennedy in the majority.

Judge Kavanaugh’s views carried the day at the Supreme Court in a different case in 2015, when a 5-4 court, with conservatives in the majority, agreed with him that the EPA had acted unreasonably when it chose not to consider the costs of first-ever national standards that required power plants to cut emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollution.

Last year, the judge was thrust into one of the hottest legal controversies of the Trump administration, when the administration sought to prevent undocumented teenagers in U.S. custody from getting abortions.

Judge Kavanaugh sought to thread the needle, allowing government officials to prevent a teenager’s abortion temporarily while they sought a way to transfer custody of the girl to a private sponsor so she could undergo the procedure.

The D.C. Circuit, with more judges participating, vacated that order, with the court’s liberal majority requiring the administration to allow the girl to leave a U.S. facility without delay to terminate her pregnancy.

Judge Kavanaugh in dissent said the court had adopted “a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong: a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. Government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”

The judge, however, has been caught in the crossfire from the case, with liberals criticizing him for letting the government keep the girl pregnant against her wishes for 11 days, and some social conservatives questioning him for not taking a harder line against the pregnant immigrant.

Among other hot-button issues, Judge Kavanaugh has voiced strong gun-rights views, dissenting in 2011 when the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by other Republican appointees, upheld gun-registration requirements in the District of Columbia as well as a ban on semiautomatic rifles.

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In this YouTube video of a lecture he gave at the Heritage Foundation, Brett Kavanaugh reflects on legal principles, constitutional rights and​ his personal experience as a judge.

Judge Kavanaugh also had a role in the legal challenge to President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, writing a dissent in 2011 saying the challenge was premature. That cautious position, which backed neither side in the ideologically charged dispute, was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court.

All the justices agreed the case was ripe for a decision, though they split 5-to-4 in deciding that a central part of the law was constitutional.

During Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the bench, Judge Kozinski praised his former clerk not only for his intellect but for his personality. “I found him to be a positive delight to have in the office,” he said, displaying a “sense of humor and a sense of gentle self-deprecation.”

On the bench, Judge Kavanaugh is known to have warm relations even with judges who frequently disagree with his legal opinions. The temperament will serve him in good stead if on the high court where ideological disagreements can be even more intense.

If for some reason his Supreme Court nomination falls short, Judge Kavanaugh is next in line to become chief judge of the D.C. Circuit—succeeding Merrick Garland, himself a one-time Supreme Court nominee whose confirmation was blocked by Senate Republicans.